<< Writing Fat | Front Page | Anti-Progressive Syllabus? >>
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Sensible Literature for Sensible People
Carol Iannone diagnoses the reading public with “Pomo Lit Fatigue Syndrome,” and I must concur: I tire of the cleverness and the sophistication. Too long has literature labored under the burden of the literary. These characters whose actions are not motivated by rational self-interest, they pale when compared to a Родион Романович Раскольников. What scene in literature is more memorable than that in which homo economicus employs a Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function to select from three his future bride? Why does the tripe of Ondaadtje—and his forbear, William Gass—meet with accolades when both expect readers
to pick out the patterns in the metaphors...oblige [them] to trust that there are patterns, while the author looks on silently.
Would that literateurs do not simply tell us what the world means. It is not so complicated as they insist. There is a moral order and violations of it, such as: murder, metaphor, complexity, and socioeconomic affirmative action. Would that they cease the production of books which demand careful attention, when such attention could be more profitably spent elsewhere—I, for one, find a day with my nose in a technical manual to be of no small intellectual reward.
Truly, if God had wanted us to spend more time pondering parables, he would have written more in the Bible. I have no doubt Iannone would concur.
Comments
Iannone is an idiot, Menand is, of course, not. In any case, I think the heart of Menand’s objection is in this: “The impulse to experiment is worthy; one wants it to yield more than suggestion.”
Menand is not doing much more than restating Jameson’s objections to postmodernism’s insistence that “difference relates.” Menand objects to postmodern collage aesthetically—or, at least, from the position of a frustrated reader. Jameson objects politically: postmodern art, like postmodern criticism (Benn Michaels and New Historicism), sees the world strictly via juxtaposition. But whereas surrealist juxtaposition was thought to dredge up unconscious material; and Benjaminian dialectical images were thought to reveal the utopian ideals within consumer schlock; and Brechtian A-effects created critical distance between the audience and the representation; pomo parataxis gives us mere hints, suggestions, fingers pointing without anything distinctly being pointed at. Jameson calls is schzoid; I’d call it paranoid: everything seems connected, but there’s no transcendent order or ultimate conspiracy, so all we have are patterns, strange signs and portents, hints, nudges, and winks. Pomo suggestiveness isn’t even fragmentation, for ruins imply some former whole, while reflexivity and parataxis refuse to acknowledge any order outside of the bits and pieces (like, say, the economic base).
This is one thing that frustrated me about Pynchon’s new novel. He made a lot of the moves I’ve loved in *Vineland* and *Mason & Dixon*—moves that made those novels better, to me, than *V.* and *Gravity’s Rainbow*. So as in *Mason & Dixon*, the characters in *Against the Day* acknowledge a collection of signs hinting at some vast military plan directed against the Balkans, and this plan is somehow connected to Anarchist politics in Europe and union politics in the American southwest and rebel politics in Mexico. But as in *Mason & Dixon*, there is no giant weapon buried in the earth, waiting to destroy the masses; there is only WWI rapidly approaching (in *M&D* it was the Revolutionary War). Pynchon wants his cake—he wants readers to connect the dots between unions, Anarchists, nationalism, plutocrats, etc.—but he wants to eat it too—he wants to refuse any order behind these historical pre-echoes.
This is no doubt why—as I just wrote in the intro to my diss, submitted in partial completion of my Ph.D. this week—the hero of so many pomo historical novels is not a middling historical agent like Waverley or Leatherstocking but rather some figure of the artist, who is often writing well after the fact (as in, say, *Libra*). Agency in pomo fiction is only granted to the writer and the writer’s self-presentations, never to the characters, whose selves are supposedly deconstructed.
So for me, the problem isn’t that we have to find patterns, or that we have to trust the artist that there are patterns to find—but rather that these patterns are plotted by the writer even as pattern or order is denied in the “real world.” Never has so much meaning been constructed out of worlds that are ultimately to be seen as meaningless, chaotic, random. And whereas the modernist or existential novel found meaning in the self, the pomo novel projects it—and then retracts or denies it—ontologically, onto the world.
"This is one thing that frustrated me about Pynchon’s new novel...“
Luther; what frustrated you delighted me and made me marvel. In properly pomo stylee I shall render the remainder of my comment by rehashing earlier words:
From Against the Day:
<blockquote>“Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendental meaning, or only the earth.”
This is a distinctive Pynchonesqueness, isn’t it, and harder to pull off than you might think. I mean the ability to do all the burlesque knock-about wink-wink ‘it’s all a metatextual joke, kids’ stuff and yet hint plangently at a transcendental numinous Something, lurking suggestively just out of textual reach. To do the one, I mean, without diluting or undermining the other. In Against the Day ... P. does precisely that brilliantly: as if there is something spinetingling in at the intersection of Aether and dynamite and crystals and elevation and Anarchy and the teeming vortices of human living. The transcendental quality is intensified by the knowledge that it really could collapse at any moment into the material and quotidian. Indeed, the tantalising intimations of this revelation are so expertly stretched out across the density and length of narrative that I am, perhaps oddly, rather reminded of Lost. But then, couldn’t we say that with just a little more humour, a few terrible invented song lyrics, a bit more potty-ish explicit sex and so on, Lost could be a properly Pynchonesque TV experience?</blockquote>
I heart pomo.
Adam, I’m not sure I expressed my beefs with *ATD* well. You’re right that what makes *V.* through *Mason & Dixon* great is that balancing act between the transcendent and the earthly: that’s his career-dominating theme. But in those early works (with the exception of *Crying*), there *was* something behind all the signs and portents. In *Vineland*, it was the steady increase in executive power. There was no conspiracy, in the end, but the reality was worse: a president with ready plans to imprison a large number of his citizens. Same with *Mason & Dixon*: the Jesuits weren’t planning to destroy the colonies, and feng shui wasn’t really at stake, but what all these portents added up to was a misprision of how colonial interests relate to the land and to its native populations. Slavery and property were the true evils of the novel.
In *Against the Day*, it’s easy to see that Pynchon was attempting the same thing. All the crystals and new weapons and vectors and gases add up to some sort of historical pre-echoes of World War I. (Pre-echo, in music recording, occurs when sound so saturates the tape at one moment that traces of it get recorded earlier on the tape—so that when you play the tape back, you hear traces of a note not yet struck.) But unlike *Vineland* and *M&D*, *ATD* doesn’t add up—even in the fragmentary math of Pynchon. Too many of its plots peter out, go nowhere, don’t add to the ultimate concerns of the novel.
Another worry I have is with the novel’s defense of the 9/11 terrorists. Pynchon clearly wrote much of the novel after 9/11. There are too many falling towers, bomb-throwing terrorists, and talk of “the supposed innocence of the bourgeosie” for it to be a coincidence. And all the characters wind up sounding like Ward Churchill: Anarchists who think that complicity with the System means you’re allowed to blow them up. Usually, Pynchon would deflate that logic, for in his novels, the only Innocents or Elect are the evil-doers; here, he fails to, perhaps because he agrees with it. In the end, the characters give up their vendettas and bomb fantasies, but not because they realize they are wrong and destructive, but because they realize family and domesticity is more fun. It’s similar to *Vineland* in that respect, but at least in *Vineland*, the 60s radicals come under attack for a total lack of politically analysis, for a childlike (or childish) attitude toward the world in which “we” are innocent and They are part of the evil System.
So I guess what I mean to say is that Pynchon usually performs what Jameson calls a cognitive mapping. Beneath all the zaniness is a real analysis of what went wrong historically, an analysis impossible for the characters, for those involved at the time of the events, for whom traces of what was about to go down took on spectral, apocalyptic qualities. In *Against the Day*, analysis is too often abandoned, and the zaniness occurs too often for its own good.
And too much of the writing is just plotting, but that’s another story. The novel should have been 2000 pages, really. I wanted more, not less.
I spy a bigger problem in the broad genre-like classification (and mis-categorization) of the “pomo novel.” The comparison here is between apple juice and orange peel: not all works involving metafiction, non-narrative, minimal plot, or anti-aristotelean structure are the same. And I get as tired as the next of the Latest It Kid (here’s looking at you, Jonathan Haruki Eugenides Eggers) popping Irony pills while racing their hybrids down Pop Culture Boulevard, but maybe we’re (the Royal We here: the critics, the marketing machine) to blame for propping this up as “pomo” in the first place (along with nearly anything that’s not “genre fiction” in glorious mass-marketed gloss). So I’m not fatigued by Pomo; I’m fatigued by Pervasive Bad Writing, Pomo, Fauxmo, and Otherwise. Which is, admittedly, an unpopular position in both cocktail circles and Oprah, but fortunately, if delivered with the charming passion of a quivery lip, can still hold an audience.
And actually, something tells me this class couldn’t be bothered to muscle its way through Gass or Barth or Pynchon or their ilk, much less try to understand the motives of each.
Wow. Guess who’s overcaffeinated?
-- Mtte.
Miette, I think we should be careful not to turn this into a battle of generations. Barth is a half-rate writer; Eugenides and Murakami have it in them to be first-rate.
Sure, not all pomo works—to continue the mistake of using “pomo” as a sort of genre description—are created equal. I’ve never been a fan of the Barth/Eco or Sorrentino/Abish brands of metafiction. The postmodern fiction I love is that tied closest to the masterworks of high modernism. Pynchon does little more than rewrite *Ulysses*, with a little *The Day of the Locusts* thrown in. But he does it so well. John Hawkes is a good example of an excellent postmodernist too often forgotten these days, even if many of his experiments come directly from the French. I’m not too concerned with originality; I’m more concerned with talent.
My own pomo fatigue is not so much about “good novels” versus “bad novels.” It’s about a certain limitation shared by all the novels across the board here. I’m currently reading Trollope’s *The Way We Live Now*, and it makes me wish we had a Trollope among all our Sternes these days, a writer with not only the scope but the imagination that makes it possible to weave the many strands of his culture and time into one coherent narrative. I wouldn’t mind if it were reflexive and pop-cultural and fragmented, so long as our time were represented and criticized in bold terms. (and Tom Wolfe just doesn’t cut it.)
”...it makes me wish we had a Trollope among all our Sternes these days, a writer with not only the scope but the imagination that makes it possible to weave the many strands of his culture and time into one coherent narrative...“
Well, I’m not too proud to make the over-obvious gesture here.
Ahem: The Wire?
Right, it’s not a generational matter any more than it is an individual one, so although I think you’re dead-splat-wrong on Pynchon, and that potential, when obfuscated by the willingness to perpetuate the prattle (vis Eugenides and Murakami, about whom I think you’re spot-on), leaves a bad taste in the brain, it’s probably a matter de gustibus.
I’m glad that so many writers are working so assiduously to challenge notions of fiction and keep it evolving, and think there’s no shortage of scribblers willing and able to tackle, criticize, and wrap their heads around culturally meaningful issues (and thank god some can even do so without putting it to readers through lenses of Severe Self-Importance). But, by and large, they aren’t going to be the writers you discover in your newspaper’s weekend book review supplement (er, if your newspaper still offers a weekend book review supplement). And thinking again about what we mean when we talk about postmodern literature, by definition (or even by it’s expanded colloquial definition) this is writing that isn’t (or shouldn’t be) beholden to the constraints that trouble you.
Then again, maybe it’s for the best that the Trollopes (or H. Jameses or Tolstoys) aren’t being dangled in front of our carrot-hungry faces, for a couple of reasons, most notably, that an abundance would only mean less time available to read the forebears themselves.
-- Mtte.
We could hardly interest a single person in reviewing Point of No Return, the novel from which the excerpt below is taken, let alone publish it, apart from ourselves. The main problems in the literary world can be found precisely where the main problems in the world are to be found:
A Small Village Near Todos los Santos
Fifty men entered a small village near Todos los Santos. They walked silently at two in the morning, covered by darkness. The entire village had hardly one hundred houses and it was inhabited by indigenous people. There was no vigilance and no police post. In the past, no protection had been needed.
For decades this place had hardly appeared on government maps. It was insignificant, too far away, squeezed between steep rocky hills on one side and a humid tropical forest on the other. The locals spoke their own language, hardly understanding Spanish, mixing Catholicism with their own ancient beliefs. The village was miserably poor but nobody was starving; families relied on their own traditional support system.
During the last decade, guerillas had periodically stopped in the village to rest and to buy food. ENLP men and women were given a small barn and were served food and water. The rebels tried to explain their strategy and their goals, giving reasons why places like this had ended up in total misery. Despite that, only one local boy decided to join them, and even that had happened five years ago. This place never sided with the government or the revolutionary army. It never managed to understand the terminology either side used. Its people knew how to fish in the streams and how to build humble huts, how to maintain fire and hunt for wild animals – they knew how to live or at least how to survive. But they knew nothing about ideology and nothing about politics. When it came to religion, to them Jesus Christ was more like a friend, a bearded peasant like themselves who guarded them from the sky. They knew nothing about this God since their minds were not trained to think abstractly and they had a tendency to believe in what they were able to touch. They knew nothing about globalization and multinational companies, nothing about the revolution that was gaining strength just a few miles away from their backyards.
The fifty men who entered the village were all well armed and their bodies showed signs of long and rigorous military training. Their black leather boots were identical with those worn by the regular army, but these men were not soldiers. Some had tattoos engraved on their arms. The tattoos moved each time their muscles flexed. They were all from the paramilitary unit, a right wing private army, although some of them had just recently retired from the regular military force. Their main purpose was to defend the present state of things in the country, to protect the feudal and hierarchical structure of society. They were paid by the powerful landowners and businessmen in Todos los Santos and in the capital. They often had to do the work that even the hardened and extremely brutal local armed forces preferred to avoid.
They entered the village and spread around, moving silently despite their heavy boots and large bodies. Each of four paths that led to the jungle was secured by two men with machine guns so no one could escape.
The leader of the paramilitary group accompanied by five of his best men went straight to the house of the mayor. They kicked the door several times but there was no answer and they kicked it again, and they leaned on it with all their force and it finally let go.
They found a middle aged indigenous man sitting at the dining table, his wife next to him. They kicked him in the stomach until he doubled and fell on the ground.
They dragged the mayor’s daughter by her hair, a sixteen-year-old girl who was hiding in the small bedroom. As she stood in the middle of the hut, they began referring to every part of her body with the dirtiest words known to their language, touching her buttocks and breasts over her old fashioned traditional dress.
“Where are you hiding them? Where are the bastards from ENLP?” asked the leader of the paramilitary group though he knew there were no guerrillas in any of the jungle villages; at least not in this area.
“They are not here,” the Mayor answered calmly, trying to get to his feet. “They have not entered this town in the last two months.”
They slapped his face. First lightly, then harder, then very hard. Blood ran from his mouth and he spat it out on the dirt floor.
...
The full chapter here: http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2007/07/10/a-small-village-near-todos-los-santos/